Hey, if Mashable can declare June 30th is Social Media Day, then I think we should all pick worthy sub-topics and time frame to discuss them.  What better way to focus everyone’s minds at a time of such rapid change?  To kick things off, I’m going to publish posts, polls and questions all this week on the intersection of thought leadership (TL) and Search Engine Optimization.

Why that topic?  First, SEO and PR people aren’t talking enough.  That’s a shame because we can help each other out a lot and make a world of difference when it comes to our companies and clients.  How?  So glad you asked.

Here are the top 10 reasons why PR needs SEO and why SEO needs PR when it comes to thought leadership.

Why PR needs SEO to do thought leadership (TL) right:

1. Showing up: Search engines aren’t just helping people find information, they’re setting agendas.  If a customer or investor is looking for information about a topic, your point of view needs to come up in search results. If not, then at best an opportunity is lost.  At worst, the stakeholder sees it as a summary judgment that your perspective isn’t as important as the ones displayed.  This applies just as well to traditional media relations.  If a reporter is looking for an expert for a story, they’ll just as easily turn to Google or Bing as they will their rolodex.  If a competitor’s expert is there and yours is not…well, that just about says it all.

2. Leading the horse to water: Thought leadership is often an exercise in convincing people they have a problem they’re not aware of.  They stumble around in the dark, thinking it’s sunshine, grappling with the problem’s symptoms not knowing its causes.  So how to get a target audience from searching for one topic to find another?  By associating your TL keyword set with terms that the target is currently searching for.  There are many ways to do this (and they’ll be discussed later in the week in another post) and it takes a good deal of planning to pull off, but once done, your targets will quickly fall into your marketing funnel.

3. Your multimedia image: With the launch of the “Jazz” user interface, Google is now displaying multimedia results alongside text links in response to search queries (Bing did this in many ways from its launch). Videos, pictures, not to mention news stories and tweets, are all building a picture of your company.   Could any aspect of image management be more important today? It’s PR’s role to figure out the best combination of multimedia results that should come up in searches and then deploy an SEO strategy to reverse engineer it into existence.

4. Community leadership: Social media allows for a totally new form of thought leadership: community creation.  This is where a group of like-minded people are brought together online in the name of a new idea and goal.   It could be in a LinkedIn group, Ning, Wiki or some other structure, but the point is that the first step in people joining is for the home base site to be found.  That takes SEO.

5. Crisis communications: When a crisis hits, the first channels people check out are broadcast news and the web.  What they find will have an immediate impact on how the coverage plays out.  What will your frightened and angry stakeholders see if they search for your company right now?

Why SEO needs PR to do thought leadership right:

1. Reputable links: For all the optimization tricks that SEO experts can pull off, the number one way to increase search engine rankings is links from reputable sources.  The highest ranked sites, like traditional media outlets, influential blogs and educational institutions, send the biggest waves of link juice to your page.  Convincing reporters, bloggers and academics to link to your thought leadership is a job left best to PR.

2. Keyword messaging: The second most powerful influencer of search engines is the keyword(s) hyperlinked to the page containing your thought leadership.  “Click here” is just about the most useless kind of term to have linked to your page.  But “Greek bond interest rate threshold,” if it links to a page on that topic, is worth the weight of its home server in gold.  So how to stimulate usage of the right keywords?  How to pick the right ones in the first place? That falls right into the domain of PR messaging.

3. Pointing out: Search engines not only look at inbound links, but outbound ones to figure out where int he locus of ideas a specific web page sits.  So choosing those sites strategically, with an eye to both relevance and authority, can make a big difference in a TL’s life.  Knowing who has “juice” as measured by both web analytics and industry savvy, is a skill that typically PR – not SEO – professionals bring to the table.

4. SEO is part of a campaign: Thought leadership campaigns don’t happen in a vacuum.  For example, a company may debut a white paper at an industry conference where an executive gives a speech.  Interviews with reporters happen in tandem, followed by webinars and other promotional tactics.  Each of these mediums has associated web properties, and getting them all to link to your TL in the most optimized order and time frame takes campaign-style thinking.  Of all the parties involved, PR has the best ability to draw all these threads together.

5. Great writing: SEO requires a lot of fancy footwork when it comes to language.  Factors like the geographic placement of a term on a page matters to search engines, as do the use of bullet points, bold words, and keyword density.  The problem is, documents written optimally for search engines and documents written optimally for people can look very different.  In fact, journalists have blamed the recent focus on SEO for making headlines duller.  It takes great PR writing skills to strike that perfect balance and create a document that can be easily understood by search engines, yet readable and pleasant to a human.

For all these reasons and more, take your company’s SEO staffer or agency out to lunch this week.  Shake their hand warmly, acknowledge how important their role is.  Open your mind and ask them to do the same.  After all, when it comes to thought leadership, SEO is now PR’s best friend.